The invention provides a means to manufacture methane, or substitute natural gas, more or less continuously from underground coal seams, or from other carbon-containing resources either above ground or underground, such as carbon, peat, biomass, oil, tar sands and any hydrocarbon, using a recycling hydrogen stream. Hydrogen is made in the process and no external source of hydrogen is needed after the initial charge. The process operating on the carbon-containing resource involves a chemical reaction induced by pressure and heat that does not involve combustion of the carbon-containing resource and wherein the process is sustained by heat is generated by chemical reaction with carbon-containing resource.
In its preferred embodiment, the process produces methane from coal without having to remove the coal from its underground location. It is conservatively expected that the process can extract about 90% of carbon in the coal seam with a thermal efficiency of about 80%. This means that about 46% of the extracted carbon or 41% of the carbon in the underground lignite is converted to substitute natural gas and produced from the process for sale or other use. The remainder of the extracted carbon is produced as pure carbon dioxide for sale, sequestration or discharge. The process also has application to above ground carbon-containing resources.
One example of utility of the process is for example where the underground coal operation has been closed after recovery of coal bedded methane. The coal formation is essentially abandoned at this stage. However, the pumped carbon mining methane production process, applied to this depleted resource, offers a potential to produce an additional 20 times more methane than was obtained from the original coal bedded methane operation.